Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

Can anyone explain to me why I must take time out of my busy Monday to go to Bank of America to discuss INSUFFICIENT FUNDS FEES THAT ARE BEING CHARGED ON A CHECKING ACCOUNT THAT NO LONGER EXISTS???

No. No one can.

So I'm lying on the couch watching TV, as I am wont to do. And every so often, I watch an ad for the new film "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People," based on the book by Toby Young, which I have not read, and starring Simon Pegg, whom I find extraordinarily funny. These ads have been running for a week or so now. I don't know if I will go see this movie. I might; I might not. I just don't know. But I DO know that every time I see the ad, I get a LITTLE MORE IRRITATED by the fact that the voiceover that says the name of the film at the end EMPHASIZES THE WRONG WORD.

The title of the film, which is also the title of the book, is what we call a "how-to" phrase.

The syntax of this particular phrase is such that, when spoken in the conventional English idiom, the stress falls thus: "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."

I think I understand why. The words emphasized are the ones that this particular handbook—if it were, in fact, a handbook and not a memoir entitled comically as if it were a handbook, the joke being that no one in his right mind would deliberately fashion himself after this protagonist—anyway, that this handbook targets. What do you want to lose? FRIENDS. What do you want to do to people? ALIENATE THEM. This is, in fact, crucial to the humor of the title, because these are precisely the things that normal, socially competent people do not want to lose nor do to people.

The voice in the advertisements, however, says, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."

I think I understand why. It is repeating the stress pattern of the first phrase—it turns both phrases into iambs. But this disrupts the sense. It DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. It suggests that this handbook—if it were, in fact, a handbook and not a film titled after a book entitled comically as if it were a handbook—that this handbook would teach you how to focus all those alienation skills on—what?—people. This is a joke that simply doesn't work. A handbook that teaches you how to "alienate people" is funny because it is the opposite of the kind of handbook a sane person (well, by American self-help cultural standards) would buy: "How to Be Nice To People," How to Please People," "How to Win The Hearts And Minds Of People." A handbook that teaches you how to "alienate people" is funny in contrast to what? Books on "How to Alienate Goats"? "How to Alienate Inanimate Objects"? "How to Alienate Aliens"?

No. None of these makes any freaking sense.

Of course, as you are already thinking, I am overthinking this. But the point is that I don't even need to think about it because I SPEAK THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. When I say, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People," my words naturally fall into place: "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People." Iamb followed by trochee. Perhaps "Lose Friends" is a spondee, both syllables stressed evenly. That makes sense too, and it sounds perfectly natural. But I have tried these phrases over and over and not once has my English-speaking tongue naturally uttered "alienate people." Because it DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

And this is how I am spending my Thursday afternoon.

Also: "leak."

I'll just cut to the chase here, people. As far as I'm concerned, my delicate, innocent ears should not be subjected to the following terms when I watch television:

Wipe
Probe
Urinary
Erectile dysfunction
Genital herpes
Spontaneity

"Fuck," "cunt," "asshole"—whatever. But "wipe"? No. Never.

Over on Ladies, there's a delightful post from our esteemed President on New Year's resolutions we'd like to make for other people. I've had my say over there on irritating drivers, etc., but there was one that I intended to add, or mention over here, which I've now had occasion to rethink before even getting it out.

What I was going to say was that, while I know such statements generally come with the best of intentions, that it is not flattering to inform a full-grown woman, when she tells you that she is a professor, that she doesn't look nearly old enough to have such a grown-up job. And I was going to kindly suggest that the world resolve not to do this anymore. In most cases, I still think this is true, particularly from other professors. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find infantalization sexy.

BUT. This morning I found a GRAY HAIR sprouting out of the top of my head, brought on, no doubt, by the stress of preparing for the spring semester with a broken right wrist, and I nearly lost my shit. So I must admit that I could have hugged the young man working at the campus Starbucks who asked me what my major was, and declared (when told I taught in the English department) that he couldn't BELIEVE I was old enough to teach, that I looked maybe 19 MAX, and then gave me a free upgrade to a grande vanilla latte on account of my New Year's injury.

Obviously, this matter is more complex than I initially realized. I guess we could say: Generally, when someone is in her "professional mode," i.e. teaching a class, or attending a conference, or trying to get the hold removed from her library account even though she has a million overdue books because she absolutely needs them for the article she's writing, do not tell her that you don't believe she is an adult. Also, if you are a grown man, do not hit on a grown woman by telling her how eighteen she looks. This is creepy on multiple levels. But if it's clear that you're not macking on or professionally compromising a woman who looks like maybe she's having a tough day because her right arm is in a cast and she can't carry books and open the door at the same time and her hair is graying and unwashed and she kind of looks like she'd rather be in bed watching an E! True Hollywood Story marathon, then maybe it's okay to underestimate her age a little, and give her free coffee.

Well, to be fair, United Airlines has, so far, only ruined the day before Christmas Eve. Let me reiterate: SO FAR. It did so by making me sit in the scuzziest branch of Newark Airport all day long before stranding me in Chicago overnight, where I am paying $72 plus tax for the privilege of staying in a crappy Hilton Garden Inn where the bar is CLOSED for something sadistically called "HOLIDAY HOURS," as if it's somehow more festive to deal with one of the most wretched days of travel ever by NOT drinking it away.

If United were an honest company, it would adopt as its new corporate slogan something I overheard a little kid say in the hotel shuttle: "I don't like the airport anymore. I don't ever want to go on vacation ever again."

Then again, if United were an honest company, it wouldn't justify its refusal to provide hotel vouchers to passengers stranded by a tidal wave of rolling delays out of O'Hare by claiming the problem was the weather. According to customer service, the air traffic crisis in O'Hare was caused by "wind ... somewhere."

I cannot believe I am not drinking a martini right now.

When it's effing SHARK WEEK and your lousy-ass Dish TV suffers a fatal malady brought on by a goddamn rain shower and the company can't fix it until after you've moved into a new house halfway through the week, just as you have to pack up and go to upstate New York for a wedding anyway. Do you understand what I am saying, people? I AM MISSING SHARK WEEK.

This is so, completely, utterly, cosmically unacceptable.

All I've been able to do is read about Shark Week on the internet, which informs me that I am missing the most awesomest television of the entire summer. From the write-up in Time Out New York:

The overall impression left by Shark Week is that modern civilization is in some sense temporary—that even as we flatter ourselves into thinking our species has subdued the planet, we are, in fact, just visiting. We chew up and spit out nature, but when it bites back—even just a nip—we react with terror, and fume at the very idea that in the 21st century, there are still some beaches or lagoons where humans shouldn’t swim.

“I was down in water with the great whites in Australia, in a cage, and I had this 18-footer come in and ram it,” Stroud recalls. “Here we are doing this film, we’re experienced, we have great equipment, I have this great cameraman, we think we’ve got it all figured out. But this shark, if he really had a mind for it, could just say, ‘You know what? That’s it. You’re all going down.’ ”

I can think of at least one satellite television company I would be thrilled to unleash a fleet of tiger sharks on right about now. ARE YOU LISTENING, DISH TV? I AM MISSING SHARK WEEK AND YOU ARE TOTALLY ON MY LIST.

I slept too much last night and haven't had enough caffeine yet today and it's made me cranky cranky cranky. I know I'm experiencing a crankiness of epic proportions because I've begun a mental list of all the things that are Obviously Intolerable, and even from within my grouch-addled brain I can tell that there is something emotionally unbalanced about some of the items. But whatever. Here's a sample of the things maliciously oppressing me today, in no particular order:

- The price of gas

- The price of bottled water

- My lack of interesting mail

- Product packaging with no discernible mechanism for removing the product from said packaging

- Other people in the elevator

- Other people in the elevator stopping at floors between where I get on and where I get off

- Other people in the elevator who push one floor and then begin to get off at every floor the elevator stops at even though it isn't the floor they pushed so someone else in the elevator has to say, "This is 4, not 6" and "This is 5, not 6" and each time someone points this out they look around and say, "It is?" as if maybe we're lying to them about how elevators work

- The fact that my coffee cup is empty, again

- The fact that my hair will never be as pretty as Neko Case's

- My personal service staff's continued insistence on not existing

- Forms

- Work

- Life, the universe, and everything

When I'm innocently sitting at my desk reading, enjoying my morning coffee, and I casually brush off a hair or thread that is tickling my bare upper arm, and it's not a hair at all but an ENORMOUS WASP, the seriously freaky alien Southern kind with the helicopter wingspan and the long, rangy legs, which are now writhing around in grotesque confusion on my desk, until the creature rights itself and zooms up into my bookshelf to nestle among MY OWN THINGS as it plots its next sinister sneak attack.

NOT. ACCEPTABLE.


It looked like this, and it violated my personal space.

I started Tuesday such a professional, and now I'm all girly and creeped out.

ETA: As I was posting this, and I swear I am not making this up, the beast appeared AGAIN and dive-bombed my computer. It is clearly an agent of some great, unfathomable evil. Enormous thanks to Jake From Down The Hall, whom I summoned to come kill the thing as it attempted to colonize the Shakespeare section of my office library.

Strategies and Techniques of Customer Service Perfected by the Fine People Running Continental Airlines International Flights at Houston (George Bush) International Airport

1. When a customer's connecting flight to Tulsa on Saturday night is cancelled, and she's been rebooked for a flight Monday afternoon because all flights on Sunday "will be either full or cancelled," and one of your colleagues has graciously given her a voucher for a night in a hotel and told her to come back the following day for a second voucher, inform her in no uncertain terms when she returns Sunday that not only will she not be receiving any more vouchers but that as far as you're concerned, there's "no record in the computer" of her even having any reservation whatsoever with your airline.

2. After she returns to her hotel to pick up the confirmation number of her flight to prove that she did, in fact, land in Houston on Continental's watch, ask her contemptuously, "Well, why don't you just fly home today?"—communicating clearly that you're onto her cunning plan to live out the rest of her days in Houston instead of, say, her own home.

3. When she points out that the reason she doesn't "fly home today" is that all of today's flights are cancelled, deny the truth of this statement three times, then say, "Oh, look, those flights have just been cancelled."

4. Fail to make eye contact and explicitly acknowledge that you "have no idea what day it is."

5. Answer any other questions, comments, or teary breakdowns by informing the customer, "Look, we don't control the weather."

(More later on Christmas, New Year's, a week in Belize, and the heroic deeds of KL in the face of crisis.)

P.S. HUGE thanks to lagizma for the card and salt-and-lime candy, to which I've developed a serious addiction.

If you slap one of those "I [HEART] OIL WAR" bumper stickers¹ on your Jeep Grand Cherokee, you are being:

A. Ironic.
B. Stupid.
C. An asshole.
D. All of the above.

¹I actually kind of love those bumper stickers, but it occurs to me now that Americans might not be allowed to make that joke. Especially the ones with bumpers.

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In other news, thebiblioholic has alerted me that NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson broke his wrist falling off a golf cart at a celebrity tournament. I'm sorry, but that's just sad. If Tony Stewart turned up with any broken bones, you know it would be from, say, kicking someone's ass. Now that's NASCAR.

ETA: I just read to the end of the story, and discovered that Tony Stewart has indeed made news with his broken bones: "Tony Stewart broke his wrist and bruised his ribs last January when he flipped a car during a qualifying race for the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals." See? NASCAR.

This summer, my favorite snack is salted limes. Yes, that's just a lime cut in quarters, sprinkled with salt. Z thinks it's disgusting, but I say it's like a virgin tequila shot, which is delicious.

The older I get, the more my childhood sweet tooth atrophies. I'm not sure I ever even had that much of a sweet tooth; my favorite foods have always tended toward the salty and sour—lemons, tomatoes, pickles, olives. But these days, especially in the heat, I positively shy away from anything remotely sugary. So I was delighted to see an article in the NYTimes last week on how sour is currently the hippest taste among the New York foodie set (replacing last week's Capital-S-Spicy, which I still love, food fashion be damned).

I am not delighted, however, to find that my lackadaisical approach to passing along vital information culled from cyberspace—particularly that which confirms that I Am Cool, Even The New York Times Says So—has resulted in this story's being filed away under Times Select, which means that when you click on the link, you will be ordered to hand over cash in order to read the story (unless you are not po' like I am and have already anted up the fee to read the NYT's good stuff). Do not do this. Refuse to support the conspiracy of extortion aimed at the slacker reading public. Just take my word for it that I have cutting-edge taste buds and leave it at that.

Here's a news item from the SFGate that you can read: Bush Acknowledges Racism Still Exists. But I think the headline really says it all on that one.

Is there ANYTHING in the world more irritating than an intermittent wireless signal?

No, there is not.

You're on my list, internet.

Did you hear the story about Dirty Dr. Diana?

I heard about it through Bitch Ph.D. Start here, then follow the links to Dr. D's own, um, coverage of the scandal.

I'm not ashamed to say that I hunted around in her flickr account to view the nudie pics myself, and they are lovely, and funny, and witty, and about the least pornographic thing I have ever seen. In fact, they communicate the kind of quick intellect and sense of humor that I would hope to find in a teacher.

Here's the thing: they're just nipples. I have them, you have them, even Jesus had them. And yes, shocking though it may be, professors have them too.

Of course, Dr. D is right when she says that it's obviously not about the nipples. It is, among other things, about the way our culture objectifies female bodies such that, when we want to discredit the authority of women, we can always charge them with the dirty and shameful possession of boobs. I mean, how are college students going to get a decent education from boobs???

Women's bodies are the open secret of our social world. And some of us live in them.

I was already grossed out by the ads for K-Y Warming Ultra Gel. I didn't need to see the K-Y Warming Ultra Gel lady talk about how moist her Miracle-Gro potting soil gets.

The NYTimes reports that Bush says the [American] national anthem should be sung only in English:

After saying he did not consider the anthem sung in Spanish to have the same value as the anthem sung in English, Mr. Bush said: "I think people who want to be a citizen of this country [sic] ought to learn English. And they ought to learn to sing the anthem in English."

I think a person who wants to be the president of this country and soapbox about the "value" of the English language ought to learn to use that language correctly.

Today's list of "how to" links from my personalized Google homepage offered to teach me several fun, quirky skills essential to modern-day bourgeois living: How to Set up an Arm Bar from the Closed Guard in Jiu Jitsu, How to Make Cat Jungle Gyms and Playgrounds, and How to Adopt a Baby from China.

Adopting a child from China could be an exciting opportunity for your family, but you'll have many papers to file before the pitter-patter of little feet fills your home. The international adoption process is time-consuming, arduous and expensive - it can take up to 18 months and cost as much as $20,000 - but it's well worth the effort.

That does sound like an exciting opportunity! And who can resist this visual, with original caption:

Perhaps your newest family member?

Awww. That's so cute that maybe you won't even notice, when you follow the image link, that it's actually a picture of some real Chinese person's baby, taken by a tourist on her visit to Xian. So, no, that is not perhaps your newest family member, because that particular baby is not for sale.

No worries, though. I'm sure Chinese orphans are just as adorable—who can tell Asians apart anyway? Just remember, after you get your Chinese baby, that it's not all just cuddles 'n' fun; you'll have to spend some time getting your little bundle of joy acclimated to your lifestyle. Some tips:

...make sure that the breed is compatable with your lifestyle. Be clear about your motives for wanting a dog - are you looking for a show dog? a protection animal? or just a family pet? Learn how a typical dog of your chosen breed behaves and whether that is a fit for your lifestyle. Keep in mind how much room your dog will have, how much exercise you plan on providing daily, grooming needs, and the "drool and hair factor."

Oops, that's from How to Buy a Purebred Puppy. My bad. Still, with a baby, maybe you should think about the "drool and hair factor." In addition,

Try to find an adoptee group of local or international adoptees or join and online forum who has international adoptees and ask questions. Removal from their culture can have a serious impact on a child, such as feelings of not belonging or being out-of-touch.

If your baby is a little grumpy-gills about such "identity issues," I would suggest getting it one of those charming little couture carriers that are all over the Upper East Side—they sure make Fifi feel special!



And now you're good to go! Happy 'dopting!

A colleague of mine has alerted me to the disturbing news from western Japan that Japanese teenagers have been subjected to a karaoke curfew:

Osaka prefecture Wednesday imposed a ban on youths under 16 going alone to any establishment with a karaoke machine after 7:00 pm in an effort to promote "sound nightlife for young people."

Cruel, cruel world! I know I need not point out to my readers the sadistic irony of barring the kids from karaoke in the name of a "sound nightlife." I imagine hoards of zombie teenagers, excluded from the civilizing rites and rituals of belting out all-but-forgotten classics of the early eighties for a loving crowd of drunken strangers late into the night, forced to roam the streets of Osaka in search of ways to (in Peaches' words) fuck the pain away, like smoking crack and consuming human flesh.

Mother Jones magazine has published a truly depressing round-up of statistics by editor Clara Jeffery demonstrating the persistent gendering of the American Fucking Dream.

For example:

Women make 80¢ on the male dollar, even accounting for time off to raise kids. If that factor is not accounted for, women make 56¢.

Over her career, the average working woman loses $1.2 million to wage inequity.

Since 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was signed, the wage gap has closed by less than half a cent per year.

And this:

Only 5 of 20-odd “thought-leader” magazines have ever had a woman as editor-in-chief. Two of those jobs were held by Tina Brown.

Only 24% of recent works in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine were written by women, according to WomenTK.com.

1/3 of those were articles on gender or family or were short stories or memoirs.

And this:

Anne Bancroft was 36 when she played Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman was 30.

And this:

Models weigh 23% less than average women. In 1986 it was only 8% less.

The above statistics were quoted in a press release for a Dove product whose adcampaign uses full-figured models but the use of which is claimed to reduce cellulite.

And this, about my own chosen career path:

Only 1/3 of female Ph.D.s who get on the tenure track before having a baby ever do so.

And this:

31.5% of Iraq's parliament are women. Only 15% of the U.S. Congress are women.

And this, perhaps my favorite:



Thank you to elpresidente for the rare political nod in Ladies.

I woke up from a long and strange dream, which involved, among other things, being served an enormous salmon-and-corn-cake appetizer at a trendy bar by the man from Afghanistan who used to fix my dad's cars when I was a kid, who remembered me and the fact that I totalled one of the cars he fixed up for us, and who was quite flirty and disarmingly handsome for one of my dad's old friends, and my leaving my purse behind in the bar as the man and my aunt and my cousin went out to our car, which was actually a dark red van, which was actually a dark red eighteen-wheeler rig, and my trying to find them but it was in an old section of New York I'd never been in before, full of enormous old architecture left to grow graffiti, and I knew this was one of those areas I shouldn't be in alone, and all the red trucks in sight were the wrong ones, so I kept going up to people asking if I could walk with them so I wouldn't be alone, never really considering that the reason not to be alone was to avoid encounters with the very people whose company I now solicited, and many hours later I found my aunt and cousin and the handsome man from Afghanistan, but it was too late for our original plan, so we went on an African safari instead, where my cousin, watching the trees zoom across a brilliant sunset, thought she was having an acid flashback, but tripping was called "transgressing," and then I felt like I was transgressing too, because the tops of the trees weren't connected to trunks, they looked like enormous chicken bones bleached dry by the African sun, hovering in the air like Dali painted them there, and then we saw a herd of gazelles, we flew right into it, and looking around I saw a pride of lions about to launch an attack, and I remembered what someone once said: Never get between the lions and the gazelles, but it was too late, we were on one of the gazelles, all four of us, and the lions were charging and pouncing, and no matter how cleverly I steered the gazelle using an improvised system of jabs and kicks in its sides, it couldn't run fast enough with all four of us on its back, and one of the lionesses ran us down.

So, anyway, I woke up from the dream to find my parents long gone for work and myself already woefully behind schedule. And on one of my bags, someone had left an article from the local private high school newspaper (sillygirl84's alma mater) entitled "Are New Teen Trends Sexceptable?" I can only assume one of my parents, or possibly but not probably their cat, left this article for me because he or she thought I would be interested in it. And I am. I am very interested in the fact that anyone thought it was acceptable to use the term "Sexceptable" in a newspaper headline. Samuel Johnson famously observed that the pun is the lowest form of wit, but I believe I have discovered one lower—what can only be called the integrated false pun. This miscarriage of language occurs when someone wrongly believes one part of a word to resemble another, shorter word in sound, and so integrates the shorter word into the longer word, to create what they must think is an innovative, communicative, and cute new term but which anyone with any respect for the language immediately perceives to be a monstrosity. Hence "sexceptable." The local business owners of Providence are grievously wedded to the integrated false pun. In addition to such actual establishments as "Hairoglyphics" and "Spadessey," which I believe I've mentioned before, there is in my very own neighborhood a toy store named "Creatoyvity." I maintain that giving such a name to your store is not only misguided but disrespectful to any and all of your potential patrons, who must inevitably face the possibility of having to utter the word "creatoyvity" in earnest, as in, "Honey, Toys 'R' Us didn't have anything for little Suzie's birthday; maybe we should try Creatoyvity?" This makes everyone look and sound silly. It is, stunningly, even worse than the damnable backwards "R" in "Toys 'R' Us," which, while so uncute as to be offensive, at least does not deform one's pronunciation of actual words.

I implore you not to tolerate the imposition of such grotesqueries on your everyday vocabulary. Feel free to use this as a forum for publicly shaming those who attempt to do so. Only when they feel the humiliation they would heap on the rest of the English-speaking world will they understand the nature of their crimes against humanity.

Those of you paying close attention to the fascinating and often sordid details of my day-to-day life will know that, back in Providence, a small group of friends and I would regularly convene to watch sea-creature and maritime adventure movies. What began as a casual Shark Movie Night quickly became an institution, and a momentous one at that, which shall henceforth be known as Lovers of Entertainment featuring Various Insurrections of the Abyss Told as Hydrographic Adventure Narratives.

Last week, a founding member of LEVIATHAN (known elsewhere as Z) sent an alarming message to the membership that I thought fit to distribute more widely, considering the grave nature of the issue at hand:

Dear Friends,
I write to alert you to a hideous travesty of all we hold sacred, now about to unfold itself at a theater near you. I refer to the forthcoming film, grievously mistitled "The Squid and the Whale." "Oh goody," you might think, "that is sure to be a rip-roaring nautical yarn of the sort I love best, replete with ferocious cephalopods and cetaceans locked in a variety of uncomfortable-looking combat positions. Perhaps some hapless swimmers will be entertainingly savaged by these noble sea-beasts!" But no, should you think thusly, you would be sadly mistaken. For "The Squid and the Whale" is in fact yet another trivial domestic farce, a coming-of-age story in which the mighty maritime monsters of the title are reduced to mere *metaphors* for some snivelling adolescent's parents. Ooh, how terrifying! Mummy and daddy carping about visitation arrangements! Fie, say I! This is beneath the dignity of the lowliest scallop! Not even the (admittedly quite fetching) presence of Anna Paquin can rescue such a cinematic miscarriage from the scorn it so richly deserves heaped upon it. Please do your utmost to teach a lesson to the pandering ninnies who would capitalize on the sacred awe a title such as "The Squid and the Whale" inspires in the bosom of every god-fearing American to pawn off such piddling nonsense on an unsuspecting public. Demand accountability!

Yours in Righteous Indignation,
Z>

Please join us in protesting the unwarranted abuse of sea creature references to sell tickets to middlebrow meditations on the feeble trials and tribulations of landlubber existence! Action taken might include: writing angry letters to the movie company, area cinemas, local government officials, and everyone else you know; picketing the movie's opening, preferably dressed as a squid and/or a whale; sneaking into the movie when it opens, sitting in the back row, and yelling, "Where's the squid?" and "Where's the whale?" at appropriate intervals, which is to say, every two seconds until you get kicked out of the theater.

Dear Leukemia and Lymphoma Society,

I write to ask you to reconsider the name of your upcoming Leukemia Cup Regatta. It sounds like a fun event, all lobster and sailing, very New England, and undoubtedly for a more than worthy cause. But there is something deeply disturbing about the idea of winning a "Leukemia Cup." It is inadvertently gross in its odd conjunction of the festive and the cancerous. It's like, Hey, I won a ... Leukemia Cup. Ew. I admit, I had a little too much to drink last night (I recently finished my Ph.D., you see) and it's been a deathly humid 98 degrees in my apartment for the last several days, so my distress this morning wasn't entirely the fault of the Leukemia Cup Regatta ad I saw on tv, but it was certainly a contributing factor.

Now that I think about it, you might consider renaming your society as well. You might recruit more members, which I support.

Keep up the good work, and happy sailing.

Sincerely,
Lady Z

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Dear Guy Who Hit on Me at the Graduate Center Bar Last Night,

This letter is not to apologize for swiftly leaving the premises after you excused yourself to have a cigarette even though my nod to your "I'll be right back" might have implied that I would still be there when you returned. I am not sorry because you are a little too slick and masculine for my taste, and I believe I left you plenty of time to find another lady to chat up, perhaps even one whose boyfriend was not sitting at the table with her while you did so. Actually, I write to let you know that I was really quite struck by your little conversational maneuver, in which you made a big show of knowing nothing about eighteenth-century British literature, presumably to make me feel really smart and well-educated, as if my writing a dissertation on the subject wouldn't make me feel smart and educated enough, and then whipped out the big "The eighteenth-century was the age of the epistolary novel, was it not?" Now, there was no chance that this move was going to get you into my pants, and I don't mean to suggest that it could, but it did leave me wondering all night and into the morning whether you've been carrying around the term "epistolary" since college, waiting to run into a woman in a bar who works on eighteenth-century literature, and now that you have, if you feel proud of your preparedness. I do not mean to be snide. In fact, I am quite impressed by your prescience. It just doesn't get me horny.

Better luck next time,
Lady Z

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Dear The Killers,

I think your song "Somebody Told Me" totally rocks, even though it was something of a hipster anthem when it hit the airwaves, and now it's the kind of thing hipsters claim not to like anymore, like The Strokes or the Green Party, so they look like they're living in the moment, and because they're so lame they never have any idea what's cool at all, even when they accidentally become fans of something that really is cool, like your song. Am I making myself clear? I had a little too much to drink last night. But your song just came on and it was awesome. I just wanted to let you know.

Rock on,
Lady Z

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Dear Brain,

I'm a little sorry that when you urged me to go home last night in the haze of a pleasant and not unhealthy buzz, I ignored you and insisted on stopping at Andrea's for a last round (or two) of Johnny Walker. But the thing is, I'll only finish a dissertation once in my life, so this was kind of a special occasion. I won't make a habit of it.

I understand that, given past examples of my behavior, you have little reason to believe that last statement. But you know what? Unless you can devise a way of transplanting yourself into a holier vessel than I, you're stuck with me, so you might as well get used to it. I've been letting you run the show practically all summer, with all your "eighteenth-century literature this" and "eighteenth-century literature that," and, frankly, it was about time you got doused in a bit of warm scotch. So I'm not really very sorry after all.

Please don't hold this against me. I'm going to need your services again starting tomorrow.

Love,
Me

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Dear Weather,

You are the suckiest suck that ever sucked. I hate you.

Lady Z

I don't know if y'all have been following the big Gay football controversy of the last couple of weeks. It all started when LSU professor Leigh Clemons tried to purchase a jersey from NFLshop.com personalized with the name of one of her former students, Randall Gay, now of (local heroes) the New England Patriots. But when Clemons tried to enter his name in the online form, she received an error message stating, "This field should not contain a naughty word."

As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.

Word spread, people were outraged, and the NFL was bombarded with angry email from people who are gay, or are named Gay, or both, or simply think any outfit that employs a homophobic word filter is idiotic. Eventually, they revisited their online shop and removed "GAY" from its list of prohibited "naughty words." So now—happy day!—you can order all the GAY football jerseys you want.

( But here's what you can't have. Warning: This field contains naughty words. )

In other news, the award for the Cutest Rat of the Day goes to...the baby cloud rat at the Bronx Zoo.

Click to see the cutest ever baby cloud rat. Awwwwwwww.

Frank Rich has a great column in today's NYTimes on the right-wing war on televised indecency. The best part part, I think, is his paragraph on the Parents Television Council, "the e-mail factory that Mediaweek magazine credits with as much as 99.9 percent of all indecency complaints to the F.C.C. in 2004":

"It is also quite a little fount of salacious entertainment in its own right. On its Web site, the organization's tireless 'entertainment analysts' compile a list of every naughty word used on television and invite visitors to 'Watch the Worst TV Clip of the Week.' An archive of past clips - helpfully labeled individually by sin ('gratuitous teen sex,' 'necrophilia') - is there for your pleasure, with no requirement for the credit card number or membership fee that porn Internet sites use as a roadblock for children."

Now who can read that without clicking? So I moseyed on over to http://www.parentstv.org/ (Parents Television Council—Because Our Children Are Watching), and discovered just what our children are watching, indeed.

( Click to read more about the warped and raunchy world of the PTC, but don't say I didn't warn you. )

I've been distracted lately by thoughts of the advertisement I saw in the Feb. 14 & 21 New Yorker for ASIMO, Honda's new domestic robot. I've been seeing ads for ASIMO periodically for a while, in such literate publications as The New Yorker and Harper's Monthly; it seems he's been in production for fifteen years or so. He's not yet for sale, so don't go tearing over to Amazon or anything, but Honda is already marketing "the dream" he represents:

( click to read how We're building a dream, one robot at a time. )

Now, my initial reaction was a feeling I have with increasing frequency these days—that startling realization that I'm living in the future, and it looks just like sci-fi always said it would. The photograph filling the top half of the full-page ad shows a happy, all-white, all-American family collected for a family photo in front of their large suburban house and pristinely mowed lawn. The family is organized on the steps in a kind of circle, with a faceless, waving ASIMO at its heart. The trinity of mom, dad, and son-in-football-jersey stand behind ASIMO, dad at the top of the circle, the head of the family; a pretty daughter sits on the steps at mom's feet, and a golden retriever smiles in that family-dog way at the bottom of the frame. Incidentally, the careful arrangement of this tableau also creates a chain of descent suggesting a domestic hierarchy that goes dad-mom/son-ASIMO-daughter-dog. I hope the girl's stiff grin belies a bedroom plastered with Bikini Kill posters and a desk full of morbid poetry and pissed-off punk lyrics. And I hope the retriever dreams of killing things. But my point is that, as persuasive as the idea of a friendly neighborhood ASIMOV to do the dishes, tend the baby, and assist the elderly may be, the dream that is being marketed here is an old one, that of domestic servitude, and one that was fulfilled years ago in this country by the institution of slavery. I'm not suggesting that ASIMO is a slave. But isn't it strange that the whole gruesome spectacle of the slave-owning family, or of the more recent and less horrid though still socially suspect phenomenon of hired domestic "help" (in fact, ASIMO's placement in the photo is analogous to that of Alice's in the Brady Bunch opening sequence), is so easily rendered heartwarming simply by replacing the abject slave/servant with a robot? That the humanlike nonhuman is such a perfect solution to the pesky problems and embarrassments of contemporary humanism?

Perhaps you think I'm making too much of ASIMO. I probably am—that's what I get paid to do. But consider the article I found in the Technology section of yesterday's NYTimes on the "new model army soldier", which informs us that "the robot soldier is coming."

( Read more about the robot soldier )

All these robot dreams bring into stark relief the real limits of the humanist imagination, which is always trying to identify the nonhuman to bear the burdens no self-respecting person could ask of a fellow human being, but which are unfortunate necessities in the world we live in. ASIMO seems friendly enough, but he's a device to disavow the embarrassment of American domestic servitude; he helps us say, "Yeah, that slavery thing was a real tragedy, but we just didn't realize that we were enslaving humans. Now we've fixed that." The robot soldier is ammunition against the shame, dispair, and outrage we feel when we catch a glimpse of the mangled body of a U.S. soldier, or the ugliness of many veterans' lives, or of the spectacle of a family in mourning. The robots enable us to defer the question of why we live the way we do, why we dream the dreams we dream, why we wage these wars at all.

By the way, ASIMO is currently on tour. If you'd like to "meet ASIMO 'unplugged'" (Honda's words, not mine), you can track his progress around the country at his website.